Microsoft SharePoint

Note : This page has been translated into English from French by a machine translation tool

When developing projects in a team, in a company or in any other type of organization, one is not always in the presence or in direct contact with the other members. So sometimes we need a tool that allows us to share content with them or to inform others of what is happening or what has happened in more or less direct relation with the projects that are being carried out and what concerns our team. An intranet can be the solution for this. Let’s see what Microsoft’s solution called SharePoint offers…

Microsoft SharePoint is part of the services included in some enterprise licenses of the Office 365 software suite (see our Microsoft Office 365 productivity software article for more information). Just like the other software in the suite, SharePoint is available not only on your computer, but also on all your mobile devices through Android and iOS applications to allow users of the service to access shared content wherever they are.

But what exactly is SharePoint for ? SharePoint allows you to share and manage content, knowledge and applications in the enterprise to optimize teamwork, allow everyone to quickly find information and collaborate efficiently. It is in fact an intranet solution.

Then concretely, it allows you to create a collaborative site to which you can give access to the contacts of your choice in order to inform your collaborators or colleagues. For example, imagine that a department manager managing a site dedicated to information concerning his department could here broadcast any news of organizational change through an attractive article that could be illustrated with a picture or a preview insert of a Powerpoint slide show. A member of a project management team could disseminate in an attractive and visual way information about the progress of work or the processing of an administrative file. We are not going to go on indefinitely with examples here, but you have certainly grasped the idea.

In addition to allowing you to create web pages and articles for your colleagues or collaborators, SharePoint is also a way to share documents. Here you can set up a real library of text documents created with Word, Powerpoint slideshows or PDF files that you can organize as you wish. You can create folders to store documents related to a particular category or you can choose to highlight a document so that all members accessing this site can know it is important and have priority access to it.

Finally, the tool offers you the possibility to create all kinds of lists in order to share them with your team and to integrate associated information such as the level of progress of a task. SharePoint then allows users who consult the contents of these lists to sort them in order to highlight the items that concern them for example. It is also possible to feed these lists with data collected from other applications and automate all this with Microsoft Flow. The applications are numerous but always with the aim of sharing information.

Microsoft offers you a quick training to learn how to use SharePoint. You have permanent access to a technical community and thanks to UserVoice you can provide suggestions for improvement as a user. These last two features are exclusively available in English.